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Kurt Weill, American

Kurt Weill, American

Michael Lasser, host of Fascinatin’ Rhythm, celebrates the music ofKurt Weill with a special performance of Weill's music.

Join WXXI on Sunday, April 7 at 2 p.m. at The Harley School's Wilson Arts Center﻿ for a special celebration of German-American composer﻿ Kurt Weill's work. Michael Lasser, Cindy Miller, and Alan Jones come together several times each year to perform the songs of major American songwriters, among them Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, and Cole Porter. To that list, they now add this distinctive composer who worked with a remarkable group of lyricists—from Ira Gershwin and Alan Jay Lerner to African-American poet Langston Hughes to playwright Maxwell Anderson. The timing of the performance anticipates the 15th annual Lotte Lenya Competition and the deepening awareness in Rochester of Kurt Weill’s music for the theater.﻿ Tickets are $25 and can be ordered online by clicking here. You can also order by phone at (585) 258-0200.

This performance is part of a special community celebration of Kurt Weill and his work. Michael Lasser has also produced three shows dedicated to the composer. Funded in part by the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, Inc., the Kurt Weill, American series, a Fascinatin' Rhythm presentation, airing Saturdays, March 9, 16 and 23 at 11 a.m. on Classical 91.5 and on public radio stations across the country, sets the stage for the 15th Annual Lotte Lenya Competition, which will take place in April at the Eastman School of Music. Also, joining in the celebration is the Eastman Opera Theatre as they present Weill and Hughes’ Street Scene April 4-7, while Nazareth College Department of Theatre Arts will perform TheThreepenny Opera April 12-14 and 19-21.

More on Kurt Weill:

Kurt Weill was born in Dessau, Germany in March 1900. He demonstrated musical talent as a child and, as an adult was a politically engaged man of the left and a composer of Modernist theater music in the 1920s and 30s. He often collaborated with Berthold Brecht, one of the major European playwrights of his time. Yet because he was a Jew, Weill left Germany for Paris in 1933, and then he and his wife, singer Lotte Lenya, came to the United States in 1935. He spent the remainder of his life here and died of heart disease in 1950, but not before he embraced America and became a major writer of American theater music. One of his major collaborators, playwright Maxwell Anderson, said in his eulogy, "It takes decades and scores of years and centuries to sift things out, but…Kurt will emerge as one of the very few who wrote great music." To learn more visit: http://kwf.org/﻿